Agree i can’t believe i forgot to mention this one!
Blender isn’t nearly as popular as the community might make you think.
Blender Artists is making $95 a month out of their Patreon. And I remember seeing a shot from Bart with something like 11 mbps throughput and 50 requests per second. If this is the biggest Blender community that’s just sad. And I don’t even want to talk about CG Cookie.
And don’t be mistaken. This is the poor man’s 3D suite. There’s money to be made but it all goes to the known faces and looking at the quality of the artwork over here I don’t think many people make money out of Blender. Hence, no money for add-on developers.
That’s how it is. It is not your fault. Good luck in your future endeavours.
1 Like
I think Blender is very popular but I also expect that user base are cheapass.
Blender would indeed have a greater proportion of users who don’t take CG as a serious venture, but it is no longer because the app. is simply incapable of being part of a serious production.
Blender being free means you have a lot more users who are kids and/or hobbyists. It also means there are far more users from countries where few, if any people can even dream of being able to afford the products from Autodesk and other vendors.
Sure, some hobbies are expensive, but the pricier something is, the less likely you’re going to invest in it with the purpose of simply tinkering around.
1 Like
You’re taking that out of context, that was only a test for CDN traffic on the posts of the last 30 days.
Well the Blender addon development goes like this:
- If you make an addon that nobody is interested in buying you make nothing
- If you make an addon that people are interested in buying you have a slight chance of breaking even on the work done before it is put on all the dodgy sites on the Interwebs where people give it away for free while collecting ad revenue on their site, crashing your sales next to zero
- If you make an addon that includes an implementation of a very useful library or a module, it might just be implemented in Blender when people realize how it’s useful and you fail to break even, again
- If you work for a month to make an addon for free and ask no money for it you might get two thank yous and one issue report on Github
I’m sure there’s a way to make profit, but so far I have not found one.
4 Likes
I know one obvious way to make profit…
Add on should be something that gives profit to buyer. Like, buying add on that do the job instead of hiring someone to do what the add on solves.
Good example is like those who created first speadsheet application to personal computers.
1 Like
How is that taking it out of context?
First of all, sorry to hear about your disappointment Peetie.
I guess a few devs make some money with their add ons. Thinking of hardops, mesh machine, graswald and so on. BD3D’s new scatter add on will also sell quite well I guess.
Since Blender is free it is used by lot’s of hobbyists and students, I think. And they might not be ready to spend money for add ons. So the potential costumer base is smaller than might be expected.
That means only add-on’s with a substantial price tag can bring in a reasonable revenue.
And therefor the add-on needs to offer a loooooooooooooooooooot.
Making a fortune with quantity will not work here.
Hmm… these are the thoughts of someone who was never and will never be smart enough to program an add-on. 
1 Like
[quote=“JollyJumper, post:30, topic:1195942, full:true”]
I guess a few devs make some money with their add ons. Thinking of hardops, mesh machine, graswald and so on. BD3D’s new scatter add on will also sell quite well I guess.[/quote]
Can you share data supporting this claim?
As far as I can tell, it’s pretty difficult to make money as an addon developer for blender. The examples you shared are people who are artists themselves developing those tools for their own needs (sounds like they’re freelance 3D artists or something, and it makes their job faster), initially, and started to sell it. They probably make some money, but it’s hard to believe that it’s worth the amount of time they invest in developing the actual tool.
Just sharing this 2 hours long interview. Andrew explains why being an addon developer for Blender is very tricky, and agree with him or not, he still makes a point.
1 Like
As I said, I’m not an add-on dev and never will be. So it makes no sense for me to really research this. But when I started to use blender half a year ago, Blendermarket still showed how many sales their products had. And I believe to remember that Graswald had over 1000 sales at the time.
At a price of 79 $, that’s still something. And I’m sure they sold quite a bit more in the meantime.
(Obviously many people bought it at a discounted price. Yet still…)
I never said it’s easy to make money with add-on’s or that you get rich with it.
But I do think that it’s not absolutely impossible to earn at least something with it.
And to be honest, I truly hope that at least some devs get some money for their work.
Cause they deserve it. Unfortunately it can’t be all…
Having said all that - I’m the wrong person to really give a meaningful answer here. 
1 Like
With the increasing adoption of Blender by studios as a replacement for the role Maya currently occupies, studios will be looking for programmers with the necessary skills for in-house workflow development. Remember that the source only needs to be released when it leaves the confines of the studio. So any widely used plugin/add-on is great exposure and adds value to your portfolio…
1 Like